


Summon Up the Blood

by monimala



Category: Good Wife (TV)
Genre: Episode Tag, F/M, POV Male Character
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-10-29
Updated: 2012-10-29
Packaged: 2017-11-17 07:51:15
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 755
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/549265
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/monimala/pseuds/monimala
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A tag to episode 4.5, "Waiting for the Knock." This isn’t his fight; there are other battles that need to be won.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Summon Up the Blood

Despite any delusions of grandeur he might have had as a wide-eyed 1L, Cary is not a white knight. He’s not a crusader, no matter how much good he thought he was doing at the State’s Attorney’s office. And he’s not a hero, even though a woman looking up at him with thankful wonder in her eyes makes him feel like more of a man. He’s just a guy with too many suits and an addiction to the bad, burnt coffee the Lockhart Gardner office manager always leaves in the break room decanter too long. Or at least that’s what he tells himself the first time he concludes Kalinda isn’t his to rescue — that he’s not that guy, it’s not his job and he can’t save her from herself. The second, third and fourth times, he manages to hammer in the personal St. Crispin’s speech with just as much conviction: This isn’t his fight; there are other battles that need to be won. The fifth time, the words ring hollow.

It’s been months since he last kissed her. Since they’ve done anything but trade office pleasantries and work chatter with that veneer of polite that skates just a little too close to awkward. But he sees the new client Saverese up in her personal space, and his pulse threatens to jump from the base of his throat. He watches their faces, their hands and the shoving, and he’s out of his chair before he knows it, in the hallway before he has time to question it. He fucking wants to save her when she’s always made it clear that she can handle herself…when she makes it clear _again_.

“Stay away from Nick,” she murmurs, hours later, when they’re walking up to Bishop’s house. “Keep contact to a minimum, confined to your billable hours. I can take care of him.” It tells him nothing and everything at the same time: using the client’s first name and staring straight ahead, her gorgeous dark eyes blank, as she does it. It’s a warning on so many levels. One that he mulls over for the laughably short duration of his arrest and when he goes home to wash off the bureaucratic stink. 

He only knows a fraction of her secrets. He’s not naive enough to think that he’ll ever learn more. He still hopes she’ll share just the tiniest bit of what’s important. He still leaves all the lights on for her. And he keeps the door to his bathroom wide open, breathing the world’s biggest sigh of relief when she slips into the shower with him. She flows into his arms like she feels safe for the first time in months — likely more for his benefit than her own. “I can take care of him,” she repeats, as the water beats down on them both and she rests her forehead against his collarbone. “Cary, you’ve got to listen to me. You have to let me do this my way.”

Like he has any other choice? He presses his lips to her hair, spreads his palm across her back and practically bleeds against the sharpness of her spine. Kalinda cuts him without even trying. He’s collateral damage in the chaos that is her life. “I know. But who’s going to take care of you?”

“I don’t need it,” she lies — this one for _her_ benefit, not his. “Steer clear of me,” she tells him, kissing him with something too calculated to be love. “Don’t care about me,” she warns, closing one soapy fist around his cock. “Don’t let me in your head.”

“It’s too late. You let yourself in.” He knows he’s probably the fourth stop on her tour of half of Chicago’s occupied showers, that she’s manipulating him with her mixed messages, her slick heat and her sad, lonely eyes…but it doesn’t matter. It’s never mattered when it comes to her. “You have free run of my head, Kalinda.”

“And your heart?” It should be a cynical question, particularly when asked while he’s balls-deep inside her, but there’s a hint of genuine curiosity in it. Maybe even a little vulnerability. “Do I have that, too?”

“Yeah. You do.” He strokes wet, silken hair back from her face, cups her jaw with the kind of tenderness he knows she will never think she deserves. “Always.”

Cary is not a good man. He’s not a white knight, a crusader, or a hero. He’s just a guy with the _potential_ to be good…for her.

 

\--end--

October 29, 2012


End file.
